I’m pretty sure Joshua has night terrors [see note below for addendum!]. It’s as fun as it sounds.
This has happened to us a smattering of times, but a recent event really settled it that this must be what’s going on. Around about 1am, Joshua started to whimper a bit in bed, so I got up to check on him. He seemed like he was a little unsettled, so I walked over to his bed and laid a hand on his back and he promptly lost his metaphorical shit.
He went from zero to just inconsolable crying and yelling. He berated us for trying to touch him or talk to him or not talk to him or give him hugs or leave him alone. No action we could take resulted in anything other than more yelling. Amazingly, Matthew slept through it. I tried picking Joshua up to bring him into our room and was rewarded with a couple incidental kicks to the balls and a very purposeful slap to the face. After maybe 15-20 minutes of this he just calmed down and then did a lot of hugging and cuddling with Daddy until he fell asleep again like nothing happened at all.
When he woke up the next day I talked to him about what happened. He claims not to remember what happened. He doesn’t remember waking up, doesn’t remember crying, doesn’t remember yelling. Now, this on its own doesn’t mean much of anything. It’s the kind of thing he would deny anyway. However, when I asked him about hitting me he responded with “I stopped when you told me to stop.” This did not happen when he was shrieking in the middle of the night. BUT… before he actually went to bed he was whining about not getting something he wanted and was kicking and flailing about. He didn’t kick me then, but he did get asked to calm down and when he did so, he got what he had been asking for (I think it was a cracker).
Now, Joshua is a sharp kid. And probably a little sneaky. However, I don’t think he’s quite so advanced that when I ask him a question about hitting me in the face in the middle of the night that at 6 in the morning, 5 minutes past waking up for the day, that he would know to deflect my question back to a previous bit of rebellion in the night. I think it’s very likely he actually didn’t really wake all the way up during the whole affair.
That’s when I looked up night terrors. With a name like that, it sounds like kids are having nightmares or are afraid of something, but what actually happens is that a few hours after a kid goes to bed, they start to transition into REM sleep. Most of the time and for most kids, this transition happens easily and normally. But for some kids some of the time they don’t transition well and what occurs is a bit of massive disorientation. And, sure enough, they won’t remember what happens during this period. The way to handle night terrors? Don’t.
You’re supposed to basically just observe. Leave the kid alone and just be around to make sure they don’t injure themselves, if they’re trashing around that much. If your kid was disoriented and confused and unhappy when they were just laying there, having parents touching and talking and intruding on the weird-ass semi-sleep state they’re in will not actually smooth anything over. So when I actually picked Joshua up to move him… that was bad.
EDIT: After consulting with a friend, it seems likely that Joshua is experiencing “confusional arousal” more than night terrors, which is a sort of a related issue. The fact that he did not appear to be in actual terror makes sense. And what’s described here fits things perfectly.
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